Scions by Josephine Angelini

Author:Josephine Angelini [Angelini, Josephine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sungrazer Publishing

Chapter 13

Tal

* * *

I crest the ridge and look down the rim of shrunken mountains that have been weathered into rolling hills. In the near distance, the Black Sea yawns in the night. Across the water is, or rather was, Colchis.

I wasn’t there when the Argonauts landed here in what was, back then, ancient Thrace. I didn’t become a part of the story until later on in that same quest, but the battle that happened here against Medea’s brother, Apsyrtus, became known to me. Apsyrtus lost to his sister’s treachery, but Jason and his Argonauts also lost much that they had stolen from Colchis.

Not the Fleece. If it were the Golden Fleece that Tantalus sought, I would not be concerned. The Fleece can only heal, not hurt.

It’s basically useless.

What Jason and the Argonauts left behind were the dragon teeth. Once sowed in the ground like evil seeds, the dragon teeth rise up, changed, and become a terrifying weapon. In the wrong hands, those could be used to destroy the world and, with it, my island.

I hike down the hillside in the cover of darkness and make my way to a smudge halfway to the water’s edge. The turned earth of their excavation will leave only a slight scar on the landscape, easily forgotten in this remote and abandoned area.

No one has dug here before, despite the many archaeological sites dotting this shore. No one has dug on this particular site because there is no ancient city to find. No grand ruins, crumbling colonnades, or shell-shaped amphitheaters. Just a ship (albeit a famous one) that was abandoned when its captain and crew had to hike across Thrace to get to the Aegean Sea on the other side.

As I approach the excavation site I can’t help but recall Medea and Jason. Yet another love story I never understood. She was a learned woman, a bright and beautiful sorceress. Jason was an opportunist. A pirate, really.

I’ve yet to discover what she ever saw in him. She was gifted enough to defeat me for her average lover, Jason, and then raise me from the bottom of the sea after he had finished with her.

And I am Talus, the last of the bronze men. I can be a colossus that hurls giant stones the size of mountains if needed, but Medea knew my one weakness—one godly vein of ichor and one human vein of blood that flows through my ankle. She called up her hellhounds as I hurled rocks at the Argos so that Jason and his men would not land on Crete, my island, and pillage it of its riches.

She fought me and defeated me. In fact, she fought all of Jason’s battles for him on the quest for the Golden Fleece. He was nothing without her, either before or after, and yet she loved him. And then she threw everything away when he threw her away.

After she murdered her own sons, she came back for me and took me to foster. She said it was because bronze was better than flesh.

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